Learning to write (essays and short stories, not how to hand-write)

Hi All,

Of the four skills necessary to be fluent in Chinese, three of them have been pretty straightforward for me to learn:

(1) Reading: consume native materials (novels).

(2) Listening: consume native materials (tv and podcasts).

(3) Speaking: converse with a native speaker (my teacher and others).

Writing... not so much.

For a period of time I would write a weekly essay, and have my Chinese teacher correct it in our lesson. That, however, took a ton of time that was probably better spent speaking so we stopped doing it.

That's why I wanted to ask:

Any recommendations on how to improve my writing if I ultimately want to be able to write an essay or short story in Chinese? Or translate a book from English to Chinese?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

I find that many writing skills carry over from English into Chinese, such as considering the audience, paragraph structure, avoiding ambiguity, succinctness, "show, don't tell", if you want to write well first you need something you want to say, write a sentence in multiple ways and choose the better candidate, and so on.  A lot of writing advice can be found in e.g. YouTube videos by professional writers, and you can apply it just as much in Chinese as in English (I like Writer Brandon McNulty's writing advice, in particular).  In any case your writing is going to be bad, very bad---if you accept this, it can take a lot of the pressure off.

I'm not aware of style guides comparable to Strunk and White in English, but Wikipedia has pages like 翻译腔 and 欧化中文 which talk about how to make Chinese Wikipedia pages sound less "translated".

If you want to submit your writing somewhere, you can submit your writing to Reddit's r/WriteStreakCN, or LangCorrect, or 65 Words, or even Archive of Our Own.  (Or even just post on Chinese social media sites like Zhihu or Tieba.)  You can get writing prompts from Reddits r/WritingPrompts or Conversation Questions.  I've also done exercises with ChatGPT in the form of (a) "give me a simple sentence, and I'll turn it into a full paragraph" (and it'll say something like "a man walked in a room", and I'll add specifics, like who is the man, why is he going in the room, what is the room like, etc.), and (b) "give me a sequence of emojis, and I'll turn it into a story in Chinese".

However, I find it's best to not get corrections, especially from untrained native speakers.  It's such a waste of time trying to differentiate between "that user's personal preference" and "actual problem"; maybe you'll make a mistake for years because some native speaker told you to do it that way.  Native speakers are not held to the same writing standards as non-native speakers.  Native speakers often rewrite the whole thing until it's incomparable with the original article.  And it's incredibly demotivating having someone dissect your writing like it's a corpse.

In any case, writing auto-corrects through reading, when you think "oh, that's better than what I wrote; I'll use that in the future".  I find ChatGPT's corrections are sometimes useful, but only when I ask for "actionable feedback" and insist on "one concrete thing I can do to improve my writing".  Or it can be useful to ask for proofreading, and compare your version and ChatGPT's version, and accept whichever corrections you like.  (ChatGPT sometimes makes "horizontal corrections", e.g., if I write 很多 it'll change it to 许多, and if I write 许多 it'll change it to 很多, and in reality, both are fine.)  Oh, I nearly forgot, DouBao has a 帮我写作 mode, where you can edit the same document with the AI.

I'm not sure what level you're at, but:

• metaphors that work in English ("men are from Mars, women are from Venus") often don't work in Chinese, and vice versa;
• chengyu tend to be used in precise circumstances, and to use them correctly, you'll likely need to know the chengyu's backstory;
• collocations are super important (e.g., if a word is an adjective, what things can it describe?) and should be considered part of what it means to "know" a word;
• you learn a whole bunch of clunky HSK grammar patterns, but it's often best to not actually use them and just write naturally.

If you're preparing for the HSK, I'm guessing the HSK6 缩写 "abridge" section will be gone after the 3.0 reform is implemented (which may happen in the next 6 or so months), and it's not really a useful skill outside the exam.  However, usually you're tasked with memorizing 6 things: "who, when, where; before, during, after" (usually there's a status quo, but something is wrong, then a change happens, then there's a new status quo).  If you're preparing for the HSK7-9 exam, there's two writing tasks and I'm currently trying to figure out what to do here (I've been studying Gaokao essays for practice).

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Or translate a book from English to Chinese?

Normally, I'd suggest not to do this: (a) at higher levels there's lots of figurative speech, and metaphors don't translate easily, and (b) L1-to-L2 written translation really seems like a separate task to L2 writing.  But translation is on the HSK7-9 exam.

LLM's are very good at correcting Chinese so just have it do them instead of your teacher 

On 11/26/2025 at 10:01 PM, dakonglong said:

Any recommendations on how to improve my writing if I ultimately want to be able to write an essay or short story in Chinese?

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I wrote many 小文章 on topics from daily life, roughly one a day, and posted them on Lang-8 for correction by native speakers. Each was less than one typed page. It was mainly an effort to improve clarity and become more succinct. In conversation (spoken) I had a tendency to automatically re-phrase everything in an effort to be understood. Was trying to get away from that habit. 

Over time, I developed a list of native speaker members who were better at giving appropriate corrections and I set the app up such that it would notify them of a new post. Quite a few casual native speakers who were just quickly "passing through" would not read the whole thing and would make corrections based just on the title and the first sentence. Sometimes, I would also post a photo or an illustration relevant to the topic. 

If I got replies that puzzled me, I would discuss them with my (live, face-to-face) Chinese teacher during class. Otherwise, it was just one of the side-projects I did to hopefully learn better and faster. 

One of the maxims I learned from this community early on was that you need to do a lot of whatever it is that you want to get good at doing. (Thanks, Imron.)